Category: Publishing

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Plug me in – Enhancing WordPress

For anyone interested, these are the plugins I currently use. I’m experimenting with one not listed but it has to prove itself before it gets any credits.

  • Spam Karma 2 (absolutely incredible, occasionally some trackback spam gets through but this just makes it all manageable)
  • Audio Player (slick way to include audio on the site)
  • Live (for the stat addicted, it shows the ip of someone on your blog while they are there, whether or not they are on the site or rss, if they are leaveing a comment etc) (Note: stat addiction can be cured. Don’t judge the success of your blog on "stats")
  • Flickr Photo Gallery (adds a tab on the upload box that allows you to easily paste several size pictures from your Flickr account)
  • Subscribe to comments (gives your readers the ability to request an email when someone replies to a particular comment thread)
  • Time Zone (automates daylight savings time adjustments so that the times on your posts are always correct) (wonder if it will break in 2007)
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Human speed limit signs in Denmark

I bet this would work in Knoxville! Denmark now has topless women holding speed limit signs in areas where speeding is bad.

There is a video as part of a viral campaign by the Danish Road Safety Council.

This movie was made by the Danish Road Safety Council and aims to draw attention to speed signs and speed limits in Denmark. Despite a decrease in speed violations, 7 out of 10 Danes still exceed the speed limit on a regular basis. Respecting the speed limits is the simplest way to save lives. [Source]

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How to post del.icio.us daily links automatically to WordPress

If you want the del.icio.us daily blog post to work in WordPress, your settings should look like the settings below. To get to these, log into del.icio.us, click "settings" and find the "dialy blog post" link. Finally click "Add new thingy."


job_name: DailyDelicious {doesn't really matter}
out_name: {wordpress user here must have at least author privileges or it won't work}
out_pass: {wordpress user password - will be displayed in plain text}
out_url: http://domainname.com/xmlrpc.php
out_time: 23 {military time}
out_blog_id: {leave this blank}
out_cat_id: 17 {number of the category id for the post - get the number under Manage->Categories}

I have decided to turn this off. Instead I have a link in my sidebar that reveals my del.icio.us tag cloud and below the cloud my most recent links.

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Comedy Central Returning to Youtube!

Some intern at Viacom’s legal department probably got scolded harshly after Viacom released how popularity of Youtube clips of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have helped their shows.

Comedy Central clips aren’t leaving YouTube for good. Viacom, Comedy Central’s corporate parent, has confirmed that it wants to find some way to keep the clips available, and has apparently given the green light for YouTube to put the material back up. No deal between the two firms has yet been done, but it sounds like one is imminent. [Source]

I understand the various business models that could be used to make money from these clips. ABC is doing very well with its popular shows being freely available online. I’ve watched more commercials rewatching Lost online than I would on television. Revver shows a great revenue model by appending an add to the end of every user uploaded video. There are many other ways. But one way to make money is to simply let the video clips air on Youtube and keep the popularity of the shows very high. Thank you Viacom for returning the clips to Youtube!

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Saddam Hussein Has The Keys To Detroit!

So he had the gas and the cars!

Saddam Hussein donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Detroit church and received a key to the city more than two decades ago, soon after he became president of Iraq.
…
“He was very kind person, very generous, very cooperative with the West. Lately, what’s happened, I don’t know,” [Rev. Jacob Yasso of Chaldean Sacred Heart ], 70, said Wednesday.
[Source]

In all fairness, Time Magazine named Adolf Hilter 1938’s Man of the Year. See also. Wikipedia shows all Persons of the Year with George W Bush taking 2000 and 2004.

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Videoblogging for money

Here is a little hint of what is to come. Google has announced that it will pay videographers $5 for every 1000 times their video is viewed on Google Video. This is not YouTube! This is Google’s answer to Revver which appends an advertisement to the end of user’s videos then pays the video maker 50% of the ad revenue every time it is clicked. Popular shows like Ze Frank’s The Show use Revver for revenue. He also sells candy. The Mentos guys made a bundle on Revver.

Grobe and Voltz, for instance, pocketed $35,000, their share of the ad revenue paid to them by Revver, for their first Coke-and-Mentos video back in July. Now, the pair could earn big bucks from Google if the latest video is a hit. The two are also hosting a video-making contest sponsored by Coca-Cola, which paid them an undisclosed amount. [Source]

I have been dying to try video publishing but I don’t feel I have the time (Ze Frank spends 6 hours creating his show of roughly 3 minutes; Rocketboom uses a staff and an entire day to produce a 3 to 8 minute show) or the tools (I really think a Mac makes video editing easier) to do it right. Maybe I should do it for the money instead of fun!

See also a similar articlea similar article now located on Tech Consumer (thanks Bob Caswell) and C|Net discussing Revver.

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Ebooks for Halloween

Oh, I’m sorry. You call that Harvest Festival now don’t you. The thought of encouraging your children to partake of a Pagan celebration is a little a scary I suppose. Wait. Isn’t Halloween supposed to be scary?

The holiday was a day of religious festivities in various northern European Pagan traditions, until Pope Gregory III moved the old Christian feast of All Saints Day to November 1 to give Halloween a Christian interpretation. [Source]

Wasn’t another holiday rooted in Pagan tradition?

…winter festivals that are believed by some to have influenced Christmas include the pre-Christian festivals of Yule [1] and Saturnalia, and many of the traditions associated with the holiday have origins in these pagan winter celebrations. [Source]

Regardless, even if you are trying hard to use non-scary costumes and take your children only to the funny haunted houses, this is a time of year for scary stories. Google has made several available as ebooks. Enjoy!

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y’awl’s neighborhood
And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse’s shell
The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller
[audio:http://blog.siliconholler.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/vprice.wav]
[Source]

[Vincent Price] had a choice between taking a percentage of the album sales or $20.000. Price was well along in his career, so he took the $20,000. He was good-natured about it when Carson told him he could have made millions off of the royalties due to the vast number of copies sold even at that time. Price laughed heartily and said: "How well I know!"
[Source]

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Star Trek’s 5 no 3 no 5 year mission

If you are a Star Trek fan, you’ll know that the original 5 year mission only lasted 3 years. What you may not know, is that production on the original series has begun again. At roughly $70,000 per episode, 4 of a planned 22 episodes, including guest appearances from original cast members, have been completed and are available as a free download on the Internet as Star Trek:New Voyages. One script was written 30 years ago. Learn more at the Star Trek New Voyages website.

C|Net lists many other Star Trek stories including:

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I haven’t chimed in on Foley yet

I am not certain that I have made a strong enough effort to introduce many of you to Ze Frank. After losing, Amanda (ie. the Rocketboom fiasco), I more or less turned my daily 3 minutes of "I’ll watch anything" to Ze Frank’s The Show. My standard disclaimer is that Ze Frank is very bright but uses some language that might not be appropriate in certain settings – maybe not quite Red Fox but definitely not Bill Cosby.

All that aside, I think today Ze Frank pretty much summed up the Foley stuff. Push play and see for yourself.

the show with zefrank
Transcript